English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Theatrical Narratives of Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Lynn M. Voskuil.  Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity.  University of Virginia Press, 2004.  268 pp.  $35.00.

By Marianne Szlyk, Purdue University

            One cannot underestimate the importance of the novel as a genre to our understanding of the Victorians.   I admit that I have presented them to my students as avid novel readers, consuming the latest installment of Dickens or Collins just as many people now watch episodes of The Sopranos or the latest Survivor.  I am sure that I’m not alone.  Certainly, literary studies must approach each period through texts, but even when investigating Victorians’ vexed relationship to theatricality, scholars have chiefly approached this problem through the novel.  Joseph Litvak’s Caught in the Act is a significant influence on our current master narrative of Victorian culture as it traces the effects of this relationship on novels.  These novels include examples from  F.R. Leavis’ Great Tradition that “not only change the possibility of the art for practitioners and readers, but . . . are [also] significant in terms of the human awareness they promote” (602) as well as ones that Leavis would have considered “minor” (602) like Mary Elizabeth Braddon or Wilkie Collins.  Indeed, as Lynn M. Voskuil observes in Acting Naturally, “[the] underexplored, interrelated history [between theatricality and authenticity] has also determined the structures of many familiar arguments [in literary studies]” (5).  She, however, approaches this period through theater, which enables her to depict the ways in which theatricality and authenticity, together with antitheatricality, infused this culture from the margins to the center.  More importantly, though, her approach enables readers to understand why theatricality was so compelling to Victorians—why it was not exclusively a moribund mode and why it was simultaneously popular and mistrusted.

            For these reasons, it may be most productive to view Voskuil’s study not simply as a Victorian project but as one that examines theatricality as an aspect of public culture and antitheatricality as more than just a local phenomenon.  Indeed, she remarks: “[a]s  Jonas Barish has shown, after all, negative attitudes towards theatricality circulated in a variety of rhetorical forms in Elizabethan England, and we have never used them to construct an entire edifice of antitheatricality for that era as a whole” (15).  As such, she continues explorations by critics such as Elaine Hadley, whose Melodramatic Tactics placed theater and politics at the center of her inquiry into nineteenth-century culture.  Paula Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics extends the generic scope of this trend, and is a useful precursor to Voskuil, especially given her use of New Historicist criticism, which includes but is certainly not limited to Stephen Greenblatt’s “self-fashioning.”  It is true that in her initial discussion of The Portrait of Dorian Grey, she appears to be picking up where Litvak ended.  However, like Backsheider and Hadley, she does not confine herself to one genre or one site of culture.  Her study encompasses William Hazlitt and George Henry Lewes’ theatrical criticism, the 1860s fashion of sensational drama, representations of Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria in public discourse, the actor-celebrities Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and, yes, a novel, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.

            Daniel Deronda serves effectively as the study’s novel for a number of reasons.   Chronologically, it fits between Hazlitt’s criticism for the late Romantic periodicals and Terry’s attempts to formulate a personal theory of acting in her public and private writings.  Moreover, Eliot’s novel belongs within both the Great Tradition constructed by Leavis to define the canonical novel and the characteristically Victorian novels now studied.  Her chapter on Daniel Deronda immediately follows her discussion of not only Hazlitt and Lewes’ development of the concept of “natural acting” but also audiences’ surprising attitudes towards the sensational drama popular in the 1860s.  This enables readers to see Eliot’s novel as it reflected discourse about the theater, and specifically to compare her depiction of her characters’ response to theatricality and authenticity to her partner Lewes’ responses to these elements in their culture.

 Daniel Deronda is also an excellent foil to the political pamphlets on Disraeli and Queen Victoria that Voskuil discusses in her next chapter.  These pamphlets respond to an 1876 bill that made Victoria Empress of India represent Disraeli as an underling whose zeal results in The Blot on the Queen’s Head (147), or a serpent tempting a solitary Queen with “the imperial crown dangling nearby” (160).  Yet to believe that the exotic(ized) Prime Minister represented a superficial, diabolical theatricality whereas the English Queen embodied guileless authenticity would be an extreme simplification.  Voskuil instead argues that Disraeli was ultimately viewed as “the apparent master of illusion” who nevertheless is mastered by his audience (168) and the Queen was also charismatic but in a way that reflected a number of factors: her position, her subjects’ love for her, and her skill at self-fashioning (144-5, 167). 

The partnership of Disraeli and the Queen may seem more relevant to that of Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, as both men were criticized for their artifice and both women admired for their lack of pretension.  However, Voskuil’s reading of Daniel Deronda is extremely important as it prepares readers to understand both couples’ ability to be “understood . . . [as] simultaneously theatrical and authentic” (167).  In the previous chapter, she has established that Eliot has constructed her less assimilated Jewish characters, particularly Daniel Deronda but also Mirah Cohen, as figures whose examples revitalize a corrupt and superficial English culture epitomized by Gwendolyn Harleth and her husband, Grandcourt.  Daniel and Mirah, however, have gained this ability through their experience as performers.  In fact, Voskuil’s reading of their first meeting uncovers the extent of their reliance on theatricality even as they explicitly deny it (115-7).  Again, though, their relationship to theatricality and antitheatricality is more complex than even this statement implies.  However, the context already established in her first two chapters makes not only this nuanced argument about Daniel and Mirah, but also her subsequent one about Disraeli and the Queen, more tenable. 

            Voskuil’s elision of generic boundaries is not always illuminating, as her discussion of Hazlitt’s privileging of Sir Walter Scott over Lord Byron in Chapter One shows.  A productive journey across generic boundaries does not preclude a sense of what contemporaries viewed as appropriate or inappropriate; in fact, it requires this sense, especially when a scholar is writing at a time when hierarchies are flattened.     Would a nineteenth-century audience have accepted Lord Byron as an actor as well as a poet?  Conversely, could Sir Henry Irving have moved from the theater to Parliament, if he had chosen?  As a public master of illusion who was able to elide generic boundaries, Disraeli was exceptional, perhaps just as exceptional as the actress Sarah Siddons was to Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb (Carlson 162).  Despite the partisan nature of the political pamphlets discussed in Chapter Four, I suspect that Victorians would have recognized Disraeli as exceptional. 

However, in general, Voskuil’s elision is productive.  Together with her knack for pairing subjects within a chapter, it enables readers to gain a larger view of Victorian culture as it was constructed through public discourse and literary texts such as criticism and the novel.  To understand why theater was so compelling to the Victorians, it is important to read Lord Byron, Edmund Kean, Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria, Sir Henry Irving, and Ellen Terry alongside each other, as well as to read novelists’ depictions of theater and theatricality alongside psychoanalytic theory.  One must construct a narrative that begins with Hazlitt’s critique of Byron and his comparison between the archetypal Mademoiselles Pasta and Mars, continues through politics and the novel, and concludes with Terry’s career as it was first complicated by Victorian constructions of femininity and later rewritten by Modernist authors, namely George Bernard Shaw and Terry’s son.  Furthermore, as my linking of Voskuil’s work to Backsheider’s suggests, it is important to see the representations of figures like Disraeli and the Queen within public discourse as part of a continuum of public image creation that includes Charles II’s attempt to mould public opinion in the seventeenth century as well as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s journey from body builder to actor to national politician.  Voskuil’s nineteenth century may also be more accessible to our post novel-reading culture as it affects even those who enter literary studies than a more limited study of this influential period would be.

Works Cited

Backsheider, Paula.  Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Carlson, Julie A.  In the Theater of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women.  Cambridge Studies in Romanticism.  Gen. Eds. Marilyn Butler and James Chandler.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Hadley, Elaine.  Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

Leavis, F.R.  [Excerpts from] The Great Tradition.  The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends.  Ed.  David H. Richter.  2^nd ed.  Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.  601-7.

Litvak, Joseph.  Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.